My family may be scattered around the country but we still make an effort to help one another out.

When I was struggling to stay in college, my brother Pat, who worked in a steel plant, lent me $500 to get through the last quarter. I had bungled a few loans to that point, but you better believe I paid him back fast.

A few years later, when I was on the ropes yet again, my stepdad Dick gave me an old red pickup to get around in. "Here you are," he said, and threw me the keys. When he heard I sold it for cash, all Dick wanted to know was, did I get a good price.

When we had our first child, he bought us a big '77 Fury at a fleet auction, to replace our ailing Beetle, so we would feel safer with the baby.

Gradually, my prospects improved. In 1988, I wanted to help my younger brother Brian. First I bought him a copy of 7 Habits of Effective People. No fool, he identified the implication that his effectiveness was in need of improvement.

Undaunted, I bought him a hot 386 PC by phone and had it shipped it to him in San Francisco. The computer, I told him, would make him a part of the global economy. But he hated it, couldn't get it to work, and passed it on to an in-law. My act of charity hung in the air like a dazed sturgeon.

But Brian must have done something right, because he just came into some money, and he asked for my help in buying a PC for our mutual mother. She had a computer in her home years ago, before Dick died, and before a flooding creek left a silt line midway across the Goldstar VGA monitor.

Then she had a heart attack. But she's better now and raring to gear up her genealogical research. It is her life's work, and she wants to get it done.

So here's the situation. My technology-hating, erstwhile once ne'er-do-well brother is on the phone offering to give our 75-year-old mom, who grew up doing hard labor on a horse farm in Michigan, a state-of-the-art multimedia workstation. Things change.

We argued whether to get her a Macintosh or a Windows machine. The Macintosh was probably the best machine for her, we felt, but none of her friends in Ohio had one. Her best friend, Sue Strick, runs the Lorain County (Ohio) Genealogy Page at here. She has been letting my mom do e-mail on her Gateway PC. My mom thinks Gateways are great.

I visited Sue's family over the holidays, and I was amazed. In my family, I was the only person really interested in PCs and the Net and stuff. Pat used a PC at work, but never got into it until this year. Brian, a devout technophobe, hates computers and the century they rode in on.

The Finleys are a pretty backward tribe.

But the Stricks of Vermilion, Ohio are the real thing. One son is a developer, and his enthusiasm has infected his four brothers and one sister. Just as some families can talk cars or farming or sports over the table, the Stricks talk computers. They are perfectly at home chatting processors and gigabytes, Netscape and ICQ. When I was with them, eating their holiday herring and pfefferneuse, a part of me wished I was in their family.

But anyway. Two weeks ago my mom sent me her first e-mail message, via Sue's computer. You could tell she was thrilled. No more waiting by the phone for her far-flung sons to call. Ring 'em up on the Internet, read 'em the riot act, and hold the long distance charges. The brittle silence on voice calls where no one's sure quite what to say, or the too-happy-by-half tone, gives way a more businesslike "Here I am and this is what I have to say" approach. Just what an efficiency-minded family like ours needs.

Brian and I veered away from Gateway, however. We agreed on "A HREF=http://www.dell.com">Dell because of its product and service quality record. The system we chose sports a 233 MHz Pentium II chip, 32 megs of memory, 4.3 gigabyte hard drive, beautiful 17-inch Trintron monitor, 56k modem, and a 32X CD-ROM drive. Plus an inkjet printer. All to run Family Tree and an Internet connection!

I'm jealous of my mom's computer. And awed by my baby brother's graciousness, to the tune of two grand. And delighted that my backward family is coming around.

I was kidding about wanting to be a Strick. I'm a Finley through and through, and I love you all.

If you want to see a brief slideshow of me and my brothers as little boys in some very old photographs, visit http://mfinley.com/presentations/my-brothers/slideshow.html.